Newsflash: Cloning for the Cure (or not); Elamonster Loves Her Labyrinth

All body image issues eliminated!

Beginning in 2012, all humans who wish to will be given the opportunity to upgrade their physical operating system. It is hope that most humans will choose the upgrade at earliest convenience. By 2020, it is projected that all humans will be on the new system, and the old format will be phased out by that time.


Here is an artist's impression of the appearance of the new human: 

Everyone will look alike, and everyone will be effortlessly skinny. There will be no invidious comparisons of self with other. Since the skin on the new physical operating system is sensitive to environmental conditions, and automatically adjusts to keep the person comfortable in heat, cold, oxygen-deprived conditions, in the presence of airborne toxins, and even underwater, there will be no need for clothing. Thus, judgment and derision based on fashion sense will become obsolete. The new human will be able to synthesize nourishment from any organic material in zhis immediate environment, and will have a natural preference for green foods. Creativity in food preparation will thus be retained, without harm to animals or disruption of the alimentary canal.

Note the pronoun "zhis" above: the nominative form is "zhe" and the accusative is "zhim." There will be no more gender distinctions between humans. Sexual intimacy will be a pleasure fraught neither with the risk of disease nor of conception, and no one will be discriminated against by the use of language.

Disclaimer: How long do you think that would last? If we're still humans, how soon would it be before we found ways to differentiate from one another? If everyone looked like the above picture, would all anorexics be cured overnight? I don't think so!

Today's prompt was maybe the hardest for me so far--to write an article announcing the miracle cure for one of our health conditions. As is probably clear, I'm not yet entirely comfortable even saying the names for my "conditions" out loud on here, as I swing back and forth between recognizing them as useful tools and heuristics for learning to do my best on the one hand and resisting the labels on the other (and a dose of denial on the third hand).

So, I tried to have a little fun with the whole body image craziness notion, but of course making everyone look alike would not solve the underlying issue! 

For the other "condition," I had a couple ideas too:

(1) Everyone with manic-depressive illness to be issued with a special synesthetic kaleidoscope, through which they can perceive the world with a breadth beyond their current "pole."

(2) A special space has been set aside (online, with a physical location in every human community) where manic people are given their choice of world-saving tasks to accomplish with their superhuman energy, including poetry writing, art, scientific discoveries, architectural design... And when they pass into depression, a special space has been saved where they are constantly reminded of all the ways they have made contributions, where they can look into their special kaleidoscopes and see that they are the same person as that crazed, world-saving person.

I lay awake last night thinking about this prompt and every miracle cure I could dream up left me cold. There are elements of disease that make us who we are, and imagining myself with all my "issues" lifted away leaves someone I do not recognize. My conclusion, with Charles Simic, would have to be "Elamonster Loves her Labyrinth."

What miracle cure would YOU love to see in the headlines? Or is there any such thing?

Gone TOo Far--Can I Turn Things Back Around? HAWMC

Today is "Stream of Consciousness Day." My first thought--"What? Stream of consciousness on my public blog?" WEGO explain that they're making precisely that challenge--that we put ourselves out there, raw, uncensored, unedited, unexpurgated subconscious thoughts and preoccupations. Their challenge: "Start with the phrase, "Today I looked in the mirror and..."--fifteen minute stream of consciousness.


OK--that's the prompt--I'm game, but afraid it'll be a stream of self-consciousness. I also worry about narcissism inherent in such a prompt, but perhaps there's something potentially narcissistic about a blog in the first place. They do say only fifteen minutes, so at least it'll be short(!) Here goes...

Today I looked in the mirror and saw dark circles under my eyes, hollow cheeks. It's nearly the end of the semester, I just have to push through a little more. I've re-established sleep at nights and taking of medications. I think I'm keeping up appearances really well: I can't imagine that any of my friends and acquaintances think anything's amiss at all.

But in truth, I'm fading.

Conversations with my husband in which he expresses deep concern about how busy I am, how little time I have to do any of the things we like to do together, how I'm not taking good enough care of myself, are becoming more frequent and more intense. This morning, he returned from a breakfast date with a friend and informed me he's ashamed of me. Ashamed that when the friend asked after me, he couldn't say I was doing well. Ashamed that my healthcare professionals are seriously concerned about me to the point that if things haven't changed within three weeks I won't be able to stay at home.

It hurts to be told that your husband is ashamed of you! It also feels kind of remote, because I'm in such a tunnel of work to be done. I know I'm running a little ragged and go a little--ok, a lot--crazy at times... But can't me being ashamed of that be enough?

The truth is, I have to acknowledge I've gone too far. In my Superpower post last week, I boasted of my minimal needs for fuel and mentioned that lately I'd been eating even less than my minimal norm. I've gotten habituated to 300 calories a day. Aside from some fatigue in the aftermath of last week's 'flu, my energy has remained fantastic, which makes it hard to understand that this isn't a good situation. The issue isn't even weight loss, although it is true my clothes are falling off of me--even with my superpower-efficient metabolism, it's a strain on my heart to be required to get so many miles to the gallon.

So, I confess--I've gone too far. And while my continued freedom makes status quo seem enticing, makes it harder to believe that this is a crisis point, said continued freedom is conditional on my keeping to a contract with my Naturopath to turn this train around and gradually, incrementally, increase the amount of fuel put in the tank.

And I can temper my incredulity that I'm in a dangerous situation, when I'm keeping up appearances so well and nobody around me has any idea about it, with the consideration that perhaps there are people around me quietly having crises to which I'm oblivious myself!

Let's all take care of each other, guys. 

What's in YOUR stream of consciousness today?

Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton; In Praise of Pills; This Week's Herbal

With my holiday goodies-making well underway and now that my camera is found, I'm feeling an absolute logjam of food-related posts building up.

So I'd better slide in something non-food-related while it's on my mind.

At our poetry group on Tuesday, we listened to an audio recording of the poet Maxine Kumin, who continues to be lucid, potent, trenchant and poetic, now well into her eighties. She talked about herself, inevitably, but the focus of the talk was her friendship with Anne Sexton, which lasted from the late '50's until Sexton's suicide in 1974. As might be expected, it was some very inspiring and also very poignant listening. Meeting as we were to support one another in our poetry practice, we listened with delight to Kumin's description of the intense intimacy with which they workshopped one another's poems. The fact that they would workshop over the phone and thus receive aural impressions of the poem long before they saw it laid out on the page (which, Kumin said, was wonderful ear-training) was intriguing to all of us as a way to add another dimension to our appreciation and critical faculties.

I felt a little wistful for a time and place in which the big poetry world was so much smaller than it is now. I'm not saying they had it easy at all, especially with the gender bias they still encountered. Kumin received a rejection note from an editor saying he'd have loved to publish her poem, but he had published a woman writer last month and had to wait a few months before he could do so again!!! But the fact that it was a smaller world creates the impression (illusion?) that entry to it might have been easier then.

Kumin's freshness was most inspiring: she said a couple times that she almost felt like she had to apologize for the fact that she was still writing and publishing new poetry, "dinosaur" as she was.

Her words about Sexton's suicide were both difficult and important for me to hear, since I have some experience with both sides of that coin. I've had a best friend commit suicide, and have narrowly missed it myself. I was glad for Kumin that she didn't experience the intense guilt that most friends of suicides experience: she explained that she'd rescued Sexton from several previous attempts, and had been warned by her in no uncertain terms that next time she wouldn't see it coming. But, as she said, here almost forty years later she's still writing it out. It's something you never get over.

She lamented the state of medication at those times and, when speaking of Sylvia Plath (who killed herself in 1963, aged only 31, and with whom they had interacted a little at the Boston Poetry Society), lamented her short life, her genius and how little time she'd had. "Think of what she'd have been able to do if she'd just had the right pills," she said.

That got me. It's probably obvious from my earlier mentions about pills that I have some resistance toward them, and I spent years avoiding them. It's also true that lately I've been having some compliance issues around my own pill program, and the results have not been pretty. It's easy to feel paranoid about 'what they're doing to you,' and to want to be 'yourself,' unmediated, unmedicated. And then it's annoying when your treatment team chorus at you that your behavior is a symptom of your disorder... But finally, these last few days, with another increase in dosage and a little consistency, I'm feeling evened out and actually more like 'myself,' even if it takes this intervention. I'm still not sleeping much, though.

Kumin's "pills" comment came from her position of deep friendship with Sexton. I sometimes feel I have to protect people I'm close to from myself, or even avoid getting too close, to spare them that potential heartache. But Kumin's words actually might have persuaded me that just taking the pills might be the best way to 'protect' the people I care about. I just need to remember this for the times when I don't care anymore if I'm nice to be around or not (or if I'm around at all)...

Speaking of sleep, my hops tincture/syrup seems to be working like a charm for several people around here--a bunch of people having trouble sleeping got their gift early! As I mentioned, I can't use it because it's not compatible with my brain chemistry.

I realized that the herbal project I had been planning was a non-adrenally-impacting "pick-me-up," when what I really needed was to calm the heck down.

So, very very simply, I made an infusion of chamomile and lavender flowers.

They're so beautiful--I find them calming even to look at.

That's about a tablespoon and a half of each, in a quart of hot (not boiling) water. I added it to my regular morning brew of Rhodiola powder and Gynostemma leaves. (The Rhodiola seems to help with anxiety, and the Gynostemma is a great all-round tonic herb, and delicious.)

 But you'll need a strainer for this--the Rhodiola and Gynostemma behave themselves and settle to the bottom (roots and leaves) but the Lavender and Chamomile float up top (flowers).

I hope you're having a lovely weekend, enjoying the quiet of midwinter, preparing holiday goodies if that's your thing.